Central to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is the argument that his business experience makes him more qualified to address the nation’s economic woes than President Barack Obama.

Though four of the past six presidents have been governors, Romney has emphasized his tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, a private equity company he helped build, over his term as governor of Massachusetts.

For months, Romney’s contention that he’s better equipped to revive the economy appeared to resonate with voters. Poll after poll suggested many voters agreed with the Republican presidential hopeful.

After a lengthy barrage of Obama ads painting Romney as a job destroyer at Bain, voter attitudes might be shifting.

A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that respondents in key swing states now look negatively at Romney’s Bain experience. Polls of Pennsylvania voters show Obama with a lead of about 8 percentage points, according to Real Clear Politics, a website tracking elections.

But in recent years, American voters have embraced the idea that candidates with a business background — or a business approach to governing — prove to be better elected chief executives. It’s been seen largely in races for city and state government.

“At the simplest level, people realize that the way we’ve traditionally done things, focusing on the skills you need to get elected — money, charisma, connections — aren’t necessarily the skills you need to govern,” said Beverly Cigler, a public policy professor at Penn State Harrisburg.

While Romney touts his CEO street cred, Obama spent two days on a bus tour taking him through Ohio and western Pennsylvania last week. He highlighted his actions to help save the auto industry.

Recent employment figures complicate the president’s claims of an economic recovery, and they could give Romney an opening in the presidential race.

Although Obama has overseen 28 consecutive months of new jobs added, the number of new jobs has sputtered in recent months.

On Friday, the U.S. government reported that only 80,000 jobs were created in June, the third consecutive month of sluggish job growth.

In the second quarter, the U.S. economy averaged about 75,000 new jobs every month, compared to 226,000 new jobs created in each of the first three months of the year.

And with the national unemployment rate remaining at 8.2 percent in June, Romney’s argument might foster renewed appeal among many voters.

Mayors led CEO shift

Business-minded mayors were elected in many U.S. cities in the 1990s.

They all took office with the same unattainable mandate: Reverse the 30-year decline of dilapidated downtowns, waning city services and decaying neighborhoods.

“In the ’90s, cities were in really tough shape, and some people thought the future of cities was over, or at least would be very unpleasant,” said Stephen Goldsmith, a former Indianapolis mayor who symbolized the business-minded city leadership of the 1990s.

“So they turned to people who had business backgrounds, or had business approaches,” he said.

The legion of “manager mayors” attacked the situation with religious zeal and what were at the time radical proposals to privatize city services, invest in tourism-based economic development and take over failing city schools.

At the vanguard of the movement were Goldsmith in Indianapolis, Rudy Giuliani in New York and Ed Rendell in Philadelphia.

Goldsmith led the reinvention of Indianapolis from a Midwest backwater into the self-professed amateur sports capital of the world.

Giuliani aggressively ramped up public safety and cleaned up vice-ridden city streets in the Big Apple.

Rendell polished up the reverence for historic Philadelphia while turning an intractable budget deficit into successive budget surpluses.

The bottom-line approach to governing challenged cities appears to have worked, turning post-industrial Rust Belts such as Baltimore and Cleveland into metropolitan oases unimaginable in the economically depressed 1970s and <ze>¤’80s.

The glittering renovated downtowns turned many voters’ heads, and they’ve subsequently looked for similar business-minded leadership at higher political levels.

Now many states, facing responsibilities previously overseen on the federal level, are run by governors with a business approach.

Gov. Tom Corbett exemplifies that mentality. He has made limited government, the privatization of state-run liquor stores, the introduction of school choice and the enactment of prevailing-wage laws big-ticket items in his agenda.

The turn toward business-minded elected officials also has spread to Congress in historic numbers.

According to Congressional Quarterly, businessmen and businesswomen make up the largest group of professions in the House of Representatives.

This move began in the mid-1990s, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich steered the GOP candidate-recruiting organization GOPAC to actively train business owners for elected office.

“Newt Gingrich understood that you need to have a farm team,” said Robin Kolodny, a political science professor at Temple University.

Resonating with business

Now, with a cadre of big-city mayors, governors and members of Congress having established laudable track records espousing business-style management and the nation paralyzed with economic angst, Romney is hoping to ride the growing voter inclination toward business management into the White House.

“Voters realize that governments have become very large enterprises,” said Lowman Henry, the CEO of the Lincoln Institute, a Harrisburg-based conservative think tank.

“And the public has also come to understand that the actions and inactions of government have a dramatic impact on the economy,” Henry said. “As a result, it’s only natural for people to look to leaders that they feel can push and pull the right levers to help economic growth.”

The institute’s biannual survey of state CEOs, released in May, found Obama’s tenure has not inspired confidence in the economy.

Asked if business conditions in Pennsylvania are better, the same or worse than they were six months ago, 30 percent of business executives said conditions are worse, according to the study.

The bulk, 51 percent, said conditions remain the same.

“That’s a killer when it comes to job creation, and right now uncertainty abounds everywhere,” Henry said. “When a business doesn’t know what to expect, then they don’t invest money, expand or create jobs. They hunker down to ride it out to see what occurs. Mitt Romney understands that.”

Romney provided a peek into his business thinking during a campaign stop in Lebanon County last month.

He suggested using public-private partnerships — a staple of business-minded governors and mayors — to help fund desperately needed improvements in the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

In such partnerships, private companies operate a road, or even part of a road, handling maintenance and repairs.

‘Art of persuasion’

But academics who study politics and public administration say the CEO to commander-in-chief argument is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

“I understand that it’s very seductive,” Kolodny said. “But businesses don’t have to worry about Hurricane Katrina or invading another country. The reason you have a state is that we’ve all agreed there are these collective problems.”

Cigler, of Penn State Harrisburg, cautioned that the appeal of a business leader in elected office is overly simplistic.

“With the public sector, you have to worry about all kinds of other factors, equity, justice, it’s not just all about efficiency,” she said. “If all we wanted from government were business skills and making a profit, we wouldn’t have a very good society at all.”

Unlike municipal and state executives, the presidency is uniquely expansive, said David Thornburgh, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government.

“The point’s been made for some time that the commander in chief is really the persuader in chief,” Thornburgh said.

Presidents often must cajole Congress, foreign potentates and even their own party.

“There’s a higher premium on communication and the art of persuasion than the straightforward management competencies,” Thornburgh said.

Even Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor, vacillated on whether the managerial skills he believes were so effective for him and other big-city mayors correspond as effectively with the presidency.

“A more businesslike approach is an absolute necessity as you go up the scale from mayor to governor to president,” he said. But “it translates with much greater complexity because the responsibilities, foreign and domestic, are so fraught with high stakes.”

Americans have often flirted with electing manager presidents. Republican industrialist H. Ross Perot’s 1992 and 1996 presidential bids drew heightened interest, but not nearly enough to propel him into the Oval Office.

Some 30 years earlier, the fortune and family ties of Standard Oil heir Nelson Rockefeller swept him into the New York governor’s office. He later became Gerald Ford’s vice president. But he never convinced Republicans to even nominate him in his determined 1960, 1964 and 1968 presidential bids.

‘People want strong leaders’

Still, Americans have elected presidents that put some element of business at the center of their administrations — more often adversarially.

President Theodore Roosevelt pushed greater business regulation and broke up monolithic steel and oil trusts. And Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former World War II supreme allied commander, ominously warned of the dangers of the “military “That’s a longstanding tradition in this country’s political culture,” said Thornburgh, the son of former Gov. and U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. “It goes back to Andrew Jackson rallying against big banks and proselytizing in favor of the small farmer and the common man.”

Historically, Americans elect leaders, not managers, as their president.

Whether it’s Republicans such as Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan or Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, they’ve usually had some inspirational quality.

“In the end, people vote for executives in politics — presidents, governors, mayors — based on whether they’re strong effective leaders, not based necessarily on whether they agree with them on every issue,” said Rendell, who also served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “Maybe it’s because people want strong leaders regardless of what they do.”

The Obama campaign has gone to great and sometimes clumsy lengths to debunk Romney’s record as a corporate executive.

For several weeks, Obama and his surrogates have pelted battleground states with ads painting Romney as a job destroyer, not a job creator.

“If you took those attributes to the White House, it would be a resounding failure,” said Randy Johnson, a former Pittsburgh-area factory worker whose company was shuttered under Bain’s stewardship, and an omnipresent Bain critic for Obama.

Henry, head of the Lincoln Institute and a member of the Pennsylvania GOP’s state committee, sees Romney’s Bain background differently.

“Mitt Romney should be well positioned because he has created jobs through Bain Capital,” he said. “Yeah, it’s under attack by Obama because in the process of creating jobs, other jobs were destroyed. But that’s the nature of a free-market economy. Sometimes you’ve got to eliminate 50 jobs to create 500.”

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